The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms and continues to the present day. This article concentrates on the early period, before the codification of the now-standard Greek alphabet.

The Phoenician alphabet was strictly speaking an abjad that was consistently explicit only about consonants, though even by the 9th century BC it had developed matres lectionis to indicate some, mostly final, vowels.[1] This arrangement is much less suitable for Greek than for Semitic languages, and these matres lectionis, as well as several Phoenician letters which represented consonants not present in Greek, were adapted to represent vowels consistently, if not unambiguously.

The Greek alphabet was developed by a Greek with first-hand experience of contemporary Phoenician script and, almost as quickly as it was established in the Greek mainland was rapidly re-exported, eastwards to Phrygia, where a similar script was devised, and westwards with Euboean or West Greek traders, where the Etruscans adapted the Greek alphabet to their own language.

Chronology of adoption

Most specialists believe that the Phoenician alphabet was adopted for Greek during the early 8th century BC, perhaps in Euboea.[2] The earliest known fragmentary Greek inscriptions date from this time, 770-750 BC, and they match Phoenician letter forms of c. 800-750 BC.[3] The oldest substantial texts known to date are the Dipylon inscription and the text on the so-called Cup of Nestor, both dated to the late 8th century BC, inscriptions of personal ownership and dedications to a god.

Some scholars argue for earlier dates: Naveh (1973) for the 11th century, Stieglitz (1981) for the 14th century, Bernal (1990) for the 18th–13th century, some for the 9th, but none of these are widely accepted.

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Herodotus' account

According to legends recounted by Herodotus, the alphabet was first introduced to Greece by a Phoenician named Cadmus:

The Phoenicians who came with Cadmus—amongst whom were the Gephyraei—introduced into Greece, after their settlement in the country, a number of accomplishments, of which the most important was writing, an art till then, I think, unknown to the Greeks. At first they used the same characters as all the other Phoenicians, but as time went on, and they changed their language, they also changed the shape of their letters. At that period most of the Greeks in the neighbourhood were Ionians; they were taught these letters by the Phoenicians and adopted them, with a few alterations, for their own use, continuing to refer to them as the Phoenician characters—as was only right, as the Phoenicians had introduced them. The Ionians also call paper 'skins'—a survival from antiquity when paper was hard to get, and they did actually use goat and sheep skins to write on. Indeed, even today many foreign peoples use this material. In the temple of Ismenian Apollo at Theba in Boeotia I have myself seen cauldrons with inscriptions cut on them in Cadmean characters—most of them not very different from the Ionian.[4]

Hyginus' account

Hyginus recounts the following legend about the introduction of Phoenician letters to Greece:

The three Fates created the first five vowels of the alphabet and the letters B and T. It is said that Palamedes, son of Nauplius invented the remaining eleven consonants. Then Hermes reduced these sounds to characters, showing wedge shapes because cranes fly in wedge formation and then carried the system from Greece to Egypt*. This was the Pelasgian alphabet, which Cadmus had later brought to Boeotia, then Evander of Arcadia, a Pelasgian, introduced into Italy, where his mother, Carmenta, formed the familiar fifteen characters of the Latin alphabet. Other consonants have since been added to the Greek alphabet. Alpha was the first of eighteen letters, because alphe means honor, and alphainein is to invent.[5]

Diodorus' account

Some ancient Greek scholars argued that the Greek alphabet should not be attributed to the Phoenician alphabet. Diodorus Siculus in his Historical Library, Book 5, suggests that the Phoenicians merely changed the form and shape of earlier letters:

But there are some who attribute the invention of letters to the Syrians, from whom the Phoenicians learned them and communicated them to the Greeks when they came with Cadmus into Europe; hence the Greeks called them Phoenician letters. To these that hold this opinion, it is answered that the Phoenicians were not the first that found out letters, but only changed the form and shape of them into other characters, which many afterwards using the name of Phoenicians grew to be common.

As for Aristogeiton, Herodotus puts him not forth at the back door, but thrusts him directly out of the gate into Phoenicia, saying that he had his origins from the Gephyraei, and that the Gephyraei were not, as some think, Euboeans or Eretrians, but Phoenicians, as himself has learned by report.

Plutarch and other ancient Greek writers credited the legendary Palamedes of Nauplion on Euboea with the invention of the supplementary letters not found in the original Phoenician alphabet. [6] The distinction between Eta and Epsilon and between Omega and Omicron, adopted in the Ionian standard, was traditionally attributed to Simonides of Ceos (556-469).

The majority of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet were adopted into Greek with much the same sounds as they had had in Phoenician. However Phoenician, like other Semitic scripts, has a range of consonants, commonly called gutturals, which did not exist in Greek: ’āleph[ʔ], hē[h, e, a], ḥēth[ħ], and ‘ayin[ʕ]. Of these, only ḥēth was retained in Greek as a consonant, eta, representing the [h] sound in those dialects which had an [h], while the consonants ’āleph, hē, and ‘ayin became the vowels alpha[a], e[e] and o[o], respectively.*

Phoenician had foreshadowed the development of vowel letters with a limited use of matres lectionis, that is, consonants that pulled double duty as vowels, which for historical reasons occurred mostly at the ends of words. For example, the two letters wāw and yōdh stood for both the approximant consonants [w] and [j], and the long vowels [û] and [î] in Phoenician. By this point in time Greek had lost its [j] sound, so Phoenician yōdh was used only for its vocalic value, becoming the Greek vowel letter iota [i]. However, several Greek dialects still had a [w] sound, and here wāw was used for both of its Phoenician values, but with different forms: as the Greek letter digamma for the consonant [w], and as the letter upsilon for the vowel [u]. Upsilon was added at the end of the alphabet, perhaps to avoid upsetting the alphabetic order that was used in Greek numerals. Phoenician hē had been used as a mater lectionis for both [a] and [e] in addition to [h], but in Greek it was restricted to [e]; its value [a] was instead written with the acrophonic letter ’āleph, while Greek [h] was written with ḥeth.

All Phoenician letters had been acrophonic. Since the names of the letters ’āleph and hē were pronounced [aleph] and [e] by the Greeks, with initial vowels due to the silent gutterals (the disambiguation e psilon "narrow e" came later), the acrophonic principal was retained for vowels as well as consonants by using them for the Greek vowel sounds [a] and [e]. Only the letter ‘ayin for [o] needed a change of name (o, later o micron) to maintain this principle.

Phoenician also had an "emphatic" consonant, ṭēth, which did not exist in Greek. However, Greek had an aspiration distinction which Phoenician did not, and used ṭēth for aspirated [tʰ].

The Phoenician consonants kaph and qōph represented sounds which were not distinctive in Greek—at most, they may have been identified with allophones determined by the following vowel. The letter qoppa was used in certain Greek dialects (notably the western dialects which ultimately gave rise to Etruscan and eventually the Latin alphabet) but elsewhere dropped out of general use.

Phoenician had three letters, sāmekh, ṣādē, and šin, representing three or probably four voiceless sibilant sounds, where Greek only required one. The history here is complicated, but basically sāmekh dropped out in certain dialects, and was reused to represent [ks] in others, while usage for the [s] sound varied between ṣādē and šin. The letter now known as sigma took its name from sāmekh but its form from šin, while the letter San, which occurred in a few dialects only, took its name from šin but its place in the alphabet from ṣādē. A further Greek letter of uncertain origin, sampi, is found occasionally, and may represent an affricate such as [ts].

*Note: some of the modern names of the Greek letters date from a much later period: see below.

Epichoric alphabets

Distribution of epichoric alphabets after Kirchhoff (1887).

In the 8th to 6th centuries, local or epichoric variants of the alphabet developed. They are classified into three main groups, following Adolf Kirchhoff (1887): green (Cretan), red (Western) and blue (Ionic, Attic and Corinthian). The main distinction is in the supplemental signs added to the Phoenician core inventory.

The green alphabets have none; the red use Φ for [pʰ], Χ for [ks] and Ψ for [kʰ]; and the blue have Φ for [pʰ] and Χ for [kʰ], with a dark blue subgroup (Corinth and Rhodos) also having Ψ for [ps].

Additional letters

In some but not all Greek dialects, additional letters were created, to represent aspirated versions of Κ and Π (an aspirated version of Τ already existed as described above) and combinations of Κ and Π with Σ. There was some variation between dialects as to the symbols used:

[kʰ] could be Κ, ΚΗ, Ψ, or Χ

[pʰ] could be Π, ΠΗ, or Φ

[ks] could be ΚΣ, ΧΣ, Χ, or Ξ

[ps] could be ΠΣ, ΦΣ, or Ψ

The unusual use of special letters for the consonant clusters [ks] and [ps] can be explained by the fact that these were the only combinations allowed at the end of a syllable. With this convention, all Greek syllables could be written with at most one final consonant letter.

Greek, like Phoenician, made a distinction for vowel length; indeed, Greek had five short vowels and seven long vowels, but only five vowel letters. As in Phoenician, the difference in length was not originally made in writing. However, by the 6th century BC the letter eta (not needed for a consonant in eastern dialects of Greek, which lacked [h]) came to stand for the long vowel [ɛː], and a new letter, omega, was developed for long [ɔː]. The provenance of omega is not known, but it is generally assumed to derive from omicron with a line drawn under it. Long [eː] and [oː] were written with the digraphsει and ου, respectively, whereas long and short [a], [i], [u] never were distinguished in writing.

Standardization — the Ionic alphabet

"In 403/2, following the devastating defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the restoration of democracy, the Athenians voted to abandon the old Attic alphabet and to introduce a standardized variant of the eastern Ionic alphabet... Apparently some thirty years later the same alphabet was introduced to Boeotia... having been adopted perhaps a little earlier in Macedonia, and went on in the course of the fourth century to displace the local alphabets throughout the whole Greek-speaking world." (A. Panayotou, "Ionic and Attic," in Christides, A History of Ancient Greek, p. 407, ISBN 978-0-521-83307-3)

The Ionic alphabet included a new letter, omega, at the end of the alphabet, and standardised the representation of various sounds which had varied from one dialect to another, as follows:

Sound

Old Attic

Ionic

[h]

Η

(no symbol)

[ɛː]

E

Η (eta)

[eː]

Ε or ΕΙ

ΕΙ

[ɔː]

Ο

Ω (omega)

[oː]

Ο or ΟΥ

ΟΥ

[kʰ]

Χ

Χ (chi)

[pʰ]

Φ

Φ (phi)

[ks]

ΧΣ

Ξ (xi)

[ps]

ΦΣ

Ψ (psi)

The absence of a letter for [h] was of no consequence for the Ionic dialects, but sometimes led to ambiguities in Attic which had retained the sound. A symbol based on the left-hand half ( ├ ) of the letter Η was therefore sometimes used to indicate the presence of [h] where necessary, and its absence was indicated by a symbol based on the right half.

During the classical period, ΕΙ came to be pronounced [iː] and ΟΥ came to be pronounced [uː], Υ having meanwhile moved to [y].

By about 200 BC a system of diacritical marks was invented, representing the tone accents in use in Ancient Greek. This also helped to indicate the length of the vowels Α, Ι, and Υ in certain cases (for instance a circumflex can only occur on a long vowel) but Greek orthography has never had a comprehensive way of indicating vowel length, and this distinction has in any case been lost in Modern Greek. This innovation of accents, as well as that of punctuation marks, has been credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium (257–ca. 185 BC).

Later developments

Cursive script, from a 6th-century private contract written on papyrus

Uncial script, from a 4th-century Bible manuscript

By the time of late antiquity and the early Byzantine period, two different styles of handwriting had developed, both suitable to the act of writing with quill and ink on soft materials (paper or parchment). The uncial script consisted of large upright letter glyphs, similar to those used in inscriptions on stone and to the modern uppercase glyphs. It was used mainly for carefully produced book manuscripts. For other types of writing, for instance private letters, documents and other types of everyday writing, a cursive script had developed that used slanted, interconnected glyphs and many ligatures.

From the mid-9th century AD onwards, the uncial script was replaced in book writing by a new writing style, the minuscule, which used more compact, rounded letter shapes and was partly based on the earlier cursive. This innovation may have centered in the scribal work of the Stoudion monastery in Constantinople.[7] The earliest type of books written in minuscule, dated from the mid-9th to mid-10th century, are called codices vetustissimi ('oldest codices'). During the following centuries, this style of writing was further developed and took on more cursive elements again. This became the dominant type of handwriting until the post-Byzantine period.

Earliest type of minuscule writing, from a 10th-century manuscript of Thucydides.

Together with the minuscule letter shapes, Greek writing also began to use word-boundary spaces and diacritics (i.e. the accent marks and breathings of polytonic orthography) more regularly. Some punctuation began also to be employed. The iota subscript was employed from the 13th century onwards.

Often in medieval manuscripts, old uncial letter forms were mixed in with the normal minuscule letters for writing titles or for emphasizing the initial letter of a word or sentence. Like in Latin, this became the root of the modern innovation of letter case, the systematic distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters in orthography. The uppercase letters of modern orthography are derived from the uncial script, while the lowercase letters are derived from minuscules.

In 1982 the monotonic orthography was officially adopted, abandoning the rough and smooth breathings (since the [h] sound had long since disappeared) and reducing the three types of accent mark to one (since the tone accent had been replaced by a stress accent).

The pronunciation of Greek has also changed considerably since ancient times, but these changes have not been apparent from the orthography, which has remained conservative — see Greek alphabet for a summary of the current situation.

The names of the letters

Some of the letters changed their names, when phonetic changes made the original names no longer distinctive, as follows:

Letter

Original name

Later name

Meaning

Ε

ei

epsilon

"plain e"

Ο

o or ou

omicron

"small o"

Υ

u

upsilon

"plain u"

Ω

ō

omega

"large o"

The letter F was probably originally called wau, but in classical times was called digamma, reflecting its shape rather than its sound. Similarly the name sampi means "like pi" suggesting that its phonetic use had been forgotten.

Some alternative theories claim that the names of the letters are intended to form words when the alphabet is conjured.

Greek numerals

The letters of the alphabet were used in the system of Greek numerals. For this purpose the letters digamma and qoppa (but not san) were retained although they had gone out of general use, and the obscure letter sampi was added at the end of the alphabet. Digamma was often replaced in numerical use by stigma (Ϛ), originally a ligature of sigma and tau, or even the sequence sigma-tau (στ').

Diffusion

The Old Italic and Anatolian alphabets are, like the Greek alphabet, attested from the 8th century BC. It is unclear whether they should be considered as siblings of the latter, adopted from the Phoenician simultaneously, or rather as early descendants of the nascent Greek alphabet proper.

Notes

^ The date of the earliest inscribed objects; A.W. Johnston, "The alphabet", in N. Stampolidis and V. Karageorghis, eds, Sea Routes from Sidon to Huelva: Interconnections in the Mediterranean 2003:263-76, summarizes the present scholarship on the dating.

^ Pierre Swiggers, Transmission of the Phoenician Script to the West, in Daniels and Bright, The World's Writing Systems, 1996

Lillian Hamilton Jeffrey, The local scripts of archaic Greece: a study of the origin of the Greek alphabet and its development from the eighth to the fifth centuries B.C., Oxford, 1961, ISBN 0-19-814061-4. The standard reference.